Five years ago I was motivated to publicly challenge disinformation about “Irish slavery” when I saw @Rubberbandits, various other influential Irish personalities & an Irish national newspaper sharing a particularly insidious piece of propaganda. We’ve all come a long way since.https://twitter.com/Rubberbandits/status/1108850120236429312 …
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The propaganda that was in high circulation at that time included the following false claims (which I then spent years debunking, contextualising and refuting, line by line, as the general explanation was not effective) 1. That an “Irish slave trade” operated from 1625 to 1839.
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2. That “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did.” 3. That “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” than enslaved Africans. 4. That “Irish slaves” were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans.
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4. That Irish women were “forced to breed” with enslaved Africans. 5. That this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.”
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6. That “if a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” 7. That “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre.
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8. That “Irish slaves” were “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives” 9. That “70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves” 10. Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”
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11. That from 1641 to 1652 “300,000 [Irish people] were sold as slaves” 12. That the use of the term “indentured servitude” is part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”
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13. That the Irish were “the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.” I welcome public debate about the spectrum of unfree labour in the Early Modern Atlantic but let’s not forget the unhistoric shit that had to be waded through to get there
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I believe that the long term antidote to the distortion of this history is to present the public with all the extant evidence re: the Cromwellian regime’s policy of transportation from Ireland in the 1650s. I’ve been working on that intermittently for circa two years.
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Liam Hogan Retweeted Liam Hogan
I’ll publish it soon, I promisehttps://twitter.com/limerick1914/status/1047416703511138304?s=21 …
Liam Hogan added,
Liam Hogan @Limerick1914This will be the first attempt to build a documentary history of these transportations from Ireland (1649–1661) and I've currently collated over 160 different pieces of correspondence, &c. This dataset will be published alongside an essay. I hope to finish it by Xmas. pic.twitter.com/JXnQqz0j1CShow this thread4 replies 13 retweets 183 likesShow this thread
From one historian to another, thank you for all you do. I am a medievalist but much of my work seems to feed into the propaganda that you work to debunk.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @Limerick1914
There have been some talks at my institution lately that, while I didn't go see them, I fear may have perpetuated the nonsense that you work against.
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